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Just two generations ago, preparing meals was as much a part of life as eating. Now we’ve given up what is perhaps our best excuse to get together and spend time with the people we love—mealtime—and someone else stands at the stove. We’re either watching cooks on TV like we would a spectator sport or grabbing grub, bagged, and eating it alone and on the go.

The fetishizing of food is everywhere. There are cutthroat competitions and celebrity chefs with TV shows, and both social and mainstream media are stuffed with an endless blur of blogs, demos and crowdsourced reviews. So why in Julia’s name do so many Americans still eat tons of hyperprocessed food, the stuff that is correctly called junk and should really carry warning labels?

Tolstoy wrote that time and patience are the two most powerful warriors. The advocates of measures restricting the marketing and sale of sugar-sweetened beverages have had to employ plenty of each, and the payoff may be coming.

It’s difficult for community efforts to fight against big money, and that’s something of which the beverage producers have plenty. But by repeating the same message — that sugar-sweetened beverages are deadly when consumed in quantity, and their marketers will not voluntarily restrain themselves from peddling their wares to children — it becomes evident that something must be done.

The current battlegrounds are Berkeley and San Francisco, where votes will be held on Nov. 4 on local soda taxes. (I’m using “soda” to mean “sugar-sweetened beverages,” including some Gatorade and Snapple drinks — which are not really “sodas” but are also pretty much useless, nutritionally, contain loads of sugar and are certainly taxable sugar-sweetened beverages. “Diet” sodas, which are really sodas but contain no sugar, are not included but have problems of their own — recent studies suggest they may contribute to diabetes and obesity rather than mitigate them.)

To me it’s the best pasta dish of fall: those late nightshades, eggplant and tomato, cooked until meltingly tender, sweet and bitter at the same time, with plenty of anise-y basil and salt in the form of grated or small-diced ricotta salata.

For whatever reason, it’s called pasta alla Norma — created in Sicily, it’s said, as a tribute to an opera, it’s said — but it’s hard to believe anything more complicated than that eggplant and tomato have been cooked together since they were grown together, and that their sauciness made them a natural on pasta. Most recipes are not recipes at all, but reveal themselves naturally, in the course of things.

I’m thrilled because my new book, How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food, went on sale today. Like its predecessors, Fast is a comprehensive guide to everyday cooking. But it’s also an all-new collection of more than 2,000 recipes that come together in 45, 30, even 15 minutes. In it, I’ve reimagined the written recipe and built something that I believe is actually better. The upshot? Cooking is more efficient, intuitive, and fun than ever before. Try it out — and if you like to take photos of your food, tag them with #HTCEFast so I can see what you think.

Pim Techamuanvivit is an old-school restaurateur, a person who knows her cuisine inside out, but she has found an intriguing new way to run a non-European restaurant. Born in Bangkok in the ’70s, into a family where delicious food was cooked and showcased daily, she came to the United States in the early ’90s to study cognitive science, specifically the subject of group collaboration. The skills appear to have set her up perfectly for opening a restaurant.

Not that that was an immediate goal. As she said when I visited her at Kin Khao, her eight-month-old Thai restaurant near Union Square in San Francisco: “I always wanted to do food. I just didn’t know how.” Because she “wanted to avoid being branded as a ‘Thai’ cook,” her route to Kin Khao was circuitous. At some point during her eight years in Silicon Valley, she began her own food blog but stopped when she felt it had become too common. Five years ago, she said, “I was around such beautiful fruits, from amazing exotic citrus to gorgeous heirloom stone fruits, I thought I’d learn how to make jam.” She won both praise and Good Food Awards for the products, but the “glorified hobby,” as she calls it, made “barely enough to finance my shoe habit.”

We could talk about cooking as a function of chemistry and physics. Better to talk about elbow grease. Specifically, a physical theory of everyday cooking, The Time-Work Continuum.

The premise is simple: You start with food, apply a variable equation of time and energy — guided perhaps, by a recipe — and sooner or later you have a meal. To eat sooner, you will have to expend more of your own energy; if you’re willing to wait, then you have the luxury of letting heat serve as the primary energy, transforming the raw ingredients with minimal input from you.

According to this hypothesis, every dish can be plotted along a single X axis, measured by Time at one end and Work at the other. If you wanted to go for fancier science, put time on the X axis and a work on the Y and plot recipes in quadrants. (Meanwhile, I’ll make a sandwich.)

The two recipes that follow demonstrate how you can use the continuum to increase your kitchen efficiency. The first, a long-cooking pork and vegetable braise, requires about 3 hours of time and 5 minutes of work. The second, a fast version of spaghetti and meatballs with red gravy, provides the counterpoint. It’s ready in less than 30 minutes, but you’ll be chopping, stirring and monitoring heat and doneness — actively working — from start to finish.

This Sunday’s “People’s Climate March” in New York City could be the biggest demonstration yet for action on climate change. The march is scheduled to coincide with the United Nations Climate Summit, which begins two days later. Despite the advance billing and the official nature of the summit, the march is what matters. The U.N. Summit will be a clubby gathering of world leaders and their representatives who will try to figure out ways to reward polluters for pretending to fix a problem for which they’re responsible in the first place; a fiasco.

That’s not hyperbole, either. The summit is a little like a professional wrestling match: There appears to be action but it’s fake, and the winner is predetermined. The loser will be anyone who expects serious government movement dictating industry reductions in emissions.

There was a time when governments dealt with international threats. Now, as the columnist George Monbiot says, they “propose everything except the obvious solution — legislation.” Rather, they will talk, commission panels, invoke market-based solutions and even offer subsidies to industry, rather than say, for example, “Wealthy nations are reducing emissions globally by 8 to 10 percent per year, beginning now.” By Klein’s estimates, that’s precisely what it will take to avoid catastrophe and that is precisely what we are not going to see.

My father, who died last week at 91, had a complex life that typified that of Jewish men of his generation. But of course when you know someone well, you see just how unusual that life is. Or was.

Murray was born in the Bronx to immigrants from Austria and Romania. (The borders have since shifted — several times.) The family was poor and became more so during the Depression. (“We were happy with a boiled potato and some sour cream,” he’d yell at me when I’d refuse to clean my plate.)

More or less chronologically, my favorite restaurant towns of the last 20 years have been New York, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and now, London. It’s been London for a few years, although a quarter-century ago — when the London restaurant scene began to explode — such a statement would have been unthinkable. Back then, I went and looked for eel pie. Back then, my attention was directed toward New York and Paris.

I don’t know what caused London to surge to the front. It may be a genuine appreciation for pedigree ingredients that predates ours and isn’t as precious; Londoners have been celebrating the arrival of asparagus and Jersey potatoes not for the last three years but for centuries. It may be that there is a broader palate: no one thinks twice about putting kidneys or brains or truly wild, highly flavorful grouse on the menu. It may be that London, of course a capital of world finance, is also a more fun city than perhaps any other, as long as you have money. It may be that, relatively speaking, the wine is cheap, mostly French, and therefore usually good even if you don’t know what you’re doing. (With the pound sterling at $1.70, nothing is actually cheap, not even breakfast.)

And it may be that I’m just in love with the place, and have been for 46 years, since I went there as a 17-year-old and, in a light snowstorm in midwinter, visited Covent Garden, then still a year-round outdoor produce market. Even more pathetic, it may be that I speak the language and I love the accent.

Say what you will about the Chinese, but they know how to make wholesale changes, and sometimes those changes are inarguably for the good. As noted in an editorial in The Lancet last week, the life span of the average person in China in 1950 was 40 years; by 2011 it was around 76. (The average life span in the United States in 2011 was 79.)

The causes of this near doubling of life span are no secret: China has developed public health programs that have reduced communicable diseases to a manageable level. This is certainly good news. But it means that people are now dying of noncommunicable diseases, or chronic diseases that are largely preventable. These diseases, most common in wealthier nations, are caused not by malnutrition in the classic sense but by overconsumption of disease-causing foods as well as lack of exercise and environmental dangers.

Because things are moving so fast in China, and because that country can learn from the example of the United States and others, perhaps it can pull off a public-health leapfrog and avoid the West’s fate of a rapid and tragic increase in obesity levels and the diseases with which they’re associated.